It is a gray, windy Sunday morning and I do what probably many of us do when a bit of air arises between everyday life and obligations. I scroll through social media. Here is a like for something funny, there directly, because it doesn't interest me to spend a few seconds longer with all the sweet dogs, because I'm basically receptive and some things just don't have to be more complicated.

Nothing special. Until my look remains on a headline.

Fifty years later, and it’s still unlievable

Fifty years. I know exactly why I clicked on it. Because the subject accompanies me and is part of my life. And because numbers do something with us. Fifty years seem so absurdly long that my brain could not scroll any further.

The contribution comes from a person whose brother took life fifty years ago. He describes memories of this day that feel remote and close at the same time. Guilt, family, silence, the consequences of generations. And something that touched me. Not the question of why. But the question of how to live with it fifty years later.

And suddenly I don't just read. I'm starting to count. My brother took life 26 years ago. I was in the middle of twenty. He too.

When sadness feels forever

In the first years after that, I have always tried to imagine how my life would look if five years have passed. Twenty. And every time this idea was barely tolerated. Not only because of longing, but because I thought that if it feels so unstoppable today, it must feel that way forever.

I know this fear many people know about a suicide. Not only the fear of loss, but the fear of the duration of the overwhelming pain. How should I ever be happy again. How can I do it without him? I'll feel my whole life like that. I'll make birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas. Do I ever make life.

Looking back, this seems incredibly logical to me today. Because we can only imagine what we have never experienced. Our consciousness often understands earlier. The head hears sentences like: It won't always stay like that. You'll laugh again. You're going to live. And sometimes he even understands that. But our psyche often hangs long behind. Not because something is wrong. Perhaps as protection, perhaps from overrequest, perhaps because a person is not made to grasp something so overwhelmingly incomprehensible at once.

Sad has its own time bill

In the beginning, the mourning pain is often so all-consuming that one might think to only consist of it. And at the same time, time suddenly behaves strangely. Days are moving, weeks are blurring, months pass without telling what actually happened in it.

This feeling of time no longer seems illogical to me today. It may be exactly what mourning is. A separate time bill, not destined by man, but fed from emotions, memories, longing, fear, love and the inconceivable. She is not interested in calendar years how we could handle it and not even how it would have looked.

Into life nobody wanted

And suicidal mourning often brings with it something own. We don't just lose one person. We also lose the life we knew up to this event, often the idea of how life works, how secure relationships are, how future looks. And sometimes even the people we were until then.

And even though no one of us chose this new life, something strange begins at some point. We grow in. Not because we let go. Not because we agree. Not because it suddenly gets good. Just because life, whether we want or not, goes on and we learn step by step to live in a reality we never wanted.

And at some point we look back and realize that we are no longer the same people. Not because the grief left us, but because we grew around them.

When I read this text, I've been wondering for the first time for many years how fifty years would feel for me. And surprisingly, this idea not only had the well-known painful in the baggage, but also some unexpected comfort. Because then I'll be real old. And somehow this thought brings me closer to my brother.

Man, not his death.

And again there is this feeling that touches me again every time. The longing and the sadness that used to have been so cutting that I thought I could barely breathe, let alone survive, today are no longer just expression of what is missing. You're also proof he was real. That I loved him. And I still love him. Not the way he left defines him. Man, the living, all that made him. This is my brother.

Between his birthday and his day of death there is a whole universe life. And that's what I feel.

He was only 18 months younger than me and somehow always there. A math genius that solved equations for fun. A gentleman with a dry humour that made women laugh and attracted animals magically. He taught them tricks and had amazing successes because they just fell in love with him. Like most people who met him. And if he could read that now, he'd be very kind. Typical.

He was the guy who asked how it was going and then really listened. He felt when someone didn't say anything, and he felt gentle. I never felt like being alone with him.

Over the years, grief and longing have become less enemies that I have to fight to not be overwhelmed, and more to companions. They are not always pleasant, not always quiet. And sometimes they still tear at the scar in my heart. But they remind me that once there was a life with my brother. He was loved and loved deep back. His life was real and left traces.

Life around the grief

That's something I couldn't see at the time and know today. Not everything that remains is pain. Love remains. And sometimes insights come to new experiences and memories. And sometimes mourning does not change because it becomes smaller, but because life around it can become bigger again.

You don't have to know how 50 years feel today. You've never been there. Until then there is a whole life, not at once, but composed of many little now. From days you can make, even though you thought you couldn't make it. For moments that surprise you. From memories that remain. And from new ones who are allowed to join. Not because of sadness. It's because life slowly finds place next to her.

For this reason, I accompany people who have to live after a suicide. Not because I have answers. It's because I know how these questions feel.